Bookmark

Statistics > Applications

Title:
Scaling and Hierarchy in Urban Economies

Abstract: In several recent publications, Bettencourt, West and collaborators claim
that properties of cities such as gross economic production, personal income,
numbers of patents filed, number of crimes committed, etc., show super-linear
power-scaling with total population, while measures of resource use show
sub-linear power-law scaling. Re-analysis of the gross economic production and
personal income for cities in the United States, however, shows that the data
cannot distinguish between power laws and other functional forms, including
logarithmic growth, and that size predicts relatively little of the variation
between cities. The striking appearance of scaling in previous work is largely
artifact of using extensive quantities (city-wide totals) rather than intensive
ones (per-capita rates). The remaining dependence of productivity on city size
is explained by concentration of specialist service industries, with high
value-added per worker, in larger cities, in accordance with the long-standing
economic notion of the "hierarchy of central places".